Max Planck

In a radical departure from classical ideas, Max Planck proposed that energy travels in discrete packets called quanta. Before Planck’s work with blackbody radiation, energy was thought to be continuous, but this theory left many phenomena unexplained. While working out the mathematics of the radiation phenomena he had observed, Planck realized that quantization of energy could explain the behaviour of light. His revolutionary work laid the foundation for much of modern physics.

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Planck, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig

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